


the wall around the self

by vitreousmonotreme



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Juno Has Some Splainin To Do, M/M, Peter Nureyev Cannot Catch A Break, Peter reluctantly encounters his blood relatives AU, not murderous mask redux compliant, post final resting place
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-24 05:59:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9706211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitreousmonotreme/pseuds/vitreousmonotreme
Summary: He's not necessarily surprised that Juno comes looking for him, or even that it's for a case, in the end. What does surprise him is who has hired Juno Steel to find Peter Nureyev.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> all credit possible to @vfdbeatrice on tumblr, who came up with this AU that I couldn't resist and is ridiculously good at feedback and encouragement and headcanons about pockets. title from "mutable earth" by louise glück.

It’s not that Nureyev doesn’t understand _how_ he was found. He hasn’t changed his patterns, his habits, because as far as he is concerned, Juno had made it abundantly clear that he would not be looking for him. So why bother? After all, Juno Steel is the only person in the galaxy left alive who had learned enough in those months on Mars to track him down.

Nothing else has changed. It had almost been enough to let him pretend that he hasn’t changed, either. Back to the old ways; skipping from planet to planet, stopping just long enough to rifle through a pocket, to slip into a locked case, to wine and dine, then smash and grab. New names, new minds, and if these ones were plastered over a new kind of tiredness, then only he noticed, and he tried his very hardest not to. And he is very, very good at making himself disappear.

And yet, here is the proof, inescapable as it could possibly be: Juno Steel, standing in the doorway of Nureyev’s hotel room, soaked to the skin, looking about as pleased to be there as Nureyev is to see him. Juno Steel – not, as Nureyev has believed he would always remain, on dry, icy Mars, in that city he belonged to more than he’d ever belonged to Nureyev, but here on stormy, tropical Laocoon, deep within the inner reaches of the Orion Arm. Here, again, within arm’s reach. And that name on his lips ( _only his; never mine; never mine again._ Let him have it, him and Brahma. For one a curse, for the other – well, maybe the same. Maybe a souvenir. It wasn’t Nureyev’s concern).

He doesn’t look good. He looks thin, haggard. He wears a glass eye now, which surprises Nureyev; from Juno, he almost would have expected the drama of an eyepatch, though evidently he’d been ostentatious enough to choose one of a color conspicuously paler than the dark brown, near-black, of his own eye. It doesn’t make him look any less eerie, less half-dead-on-his-feet, less like a ghost.

He breaks the silence. “Nureyev.”

Nureyev is not in the mood. (He is. He wants to be. He doesn’t know what he wants. This is a new experience for him.) “If you like.”

Juno moves a little – impatient? Anxious? Unsure? “Listen, I need to…” He lets out a breath. “There’s something I need to tell you. That’s why I’m here.”

Conflicting emotions, says the part of Nureyev’s mind that takes over when things go wrong, that goes smooth and composed and finds a way out. Fear. Excitement (either could be what is pushing his heart rate through the roof). Anguish (the memory of waking, of the silence in that room). And a cold anger, which, unlike the others, he can use.

“I’m afraid it’s not going to be quite that simple, Steel,” he says, turning away, moving further into the room, away from Juno.

Nureyev can feel Juno hesitating, uncertain, behind him. “Nureyev –”

“No, I still want to hear it,” Nureyev says, cutting him off. “Go on. Grovel. Do your best to explain what you did. I want to hear what you have to say.”

There’s a long silence. Too long. And then he says, “Nureyev, I –”

His voice chokes, and he stops for a moment. Nureyev waits. And then Juno says something that really, truly does surprise him.

“That’s not why I came.”

The cold feeling washes over him.

“Of course.” Nureyev’s voice comes out sharp, tight, with knives in it. He can make himself turn around now, look at Juno impassively, coolly. If this isn’t an affair of love, then it’s work. And Nureyev is nothing if not good at compartmentalizing. “Well, then, I think you’d better get down to business, and tell me why. It must be quite something, to have brought you all the way out here.”

Juno takes a deep breath, and his whole body shakes. ( _That body, pressed against mine in Miasma’s cells, in the Triad’s back rooms, in his apartment, in that hotel, shaking underneath me–_ )

“Someone recognized you,” he says.

Bad news. The worst news, Nureyev once would have thought. “How?”

“The Kanagawa streams.” Juno, too, is brisk now, speaking in clipped tones. “Some doc that made its way to the Outer Rim, months late, about Cassie’s arrest. They saw you, and they knew who you were. Your name, your real name.”

The Outer Rim. “Brahma?”

“No.” His voice falters again, and something flickers over his face that is too quick for Nureyev to place – anger? Pain? He never did quite puzzle out the mystery of Juno Steel, and he can’t decipher him now. “No, it’s – surprisingly, no. No. Nova Alexandria.”

“That’s a trading hub. Anyone there could be from anywhere. It doesn’t tell me who’s looking for me.” Nureyev pauses. “How do you know about this? If they were putting it about that an AWOL Dark Matters agent was Brahma’s most wanted, I’d have heard.”

“No,” Juno repeats ( _I wish, just once, he would give me a yes, and mean it_ ). His voice drops, and finally, he takes another shaky step into the room. The door shuts on the outside world, and it’s just the two of them, alone. “They came to me to ask who you were. Since I was with you in the video. It’s a lot easier to track me down, I guess.”

The pieces begin to fall into place, though they’re hardly landing in a pattern that quiets the maelstrom inside of Nureyev. Of course. How very like Juno. Whatever his feelings about Nureyev, when he became involved, he felt compelled to come and tell the thief that his anonymity was threatened.

_At least that means he doesn’t hate me._

_But why leave, then?_ The response to himself, acidic. _If his feelings amount to concern, but not love, why not_ say something _?_

“I hope you were careful,” Nureyev says, affecting nonchalance, pretending not to be thrown by him. “Your coming to warn me doesn’t do me much good if you were followed here.”

“They didn’t follow me,” Juno says.

“You sound very certain.”

“She didn’t just ask questions,” Juno says, and Nureyev noted the change in pronouns – _they_ could have been an individual, but also could have been a group, a corporation, a government, a deliberately distancing choice. But _she_ had to be a _someone_. “She hired me to find you.”

“Of course. You’re the only person in the galaxy who could. You took the job to distract her?”

Silence again. An eternity of silence.

“Nureyev,” Juno says, “I felt I owed it to you. After what –”

“After what you did, you made it perfectly clear that there are _no_ debts between us.” He can’t deal with it anymore, not with this. “I gave you the offer, didn’t I? If you wanted, we parted ways. No questions asked, no return policy, no looking back. And you made it _eminently_ clear what you wanted, in the most – well, the most _you_ possible fashion, didn’t you?”

Juno flinches at these words, putting a blaze of sick satisfaction in Nureyev’s heart, as well as a knife of regret.

Then something snaps.

Steel crosses the room in a heartbeat, ending only inches away from Nureyev, anger burning in his remaining true eye. “ _Damn_ it, Nureyev, do you think I _want_ this? Do you think I – ” His voice breaks, and he swallows. “I can’t _do_ that right now, Nureyev. Maybe that’s a conversation we’re gonna have to have now. Maybe it was always gonna happen. Maybe we’re just meant to keep circling this stupid event horizon until one or both of us falls in. Maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s karma, making me pay up for what I did to you, because I’m not going to pretend that that was – that I don’t – shit, I don’t _care_ what it is anymore. But yeah, I felt like I _owed_ this to you, because whether either of us likes it or not, this got dumped into my hands, and I’m the only person who can _do_ anything about it. I’m the only person who can give you this chance.”

He swallows, and Nureyev can almost feel the air move around his throat. They are close, too close, and Juno must know it, but he doesn’t move away.

“For anyone else,” he says, “I would have done what you said. Taken the job, spun some lies.”

“Good to know I mean so _much_ to you.”

“Not anyone but _you_ ,” he says. “Anyone but _her_.”

“Who is _she_ , then? This mysterious client for whom you’ll go so above and beyond?” The words are bitter, maybe even jealous, but it isn’t as though Nureyev cares at this point. He doesn’t care if he hurts Juno, if Juno has betrayed him, if it ends here.

Juno goes still, and then, finally, he pulls away, just a few inches. “Nureyev,” he says, “I think she’s your sister.”


	2. Chapter 2

( _Remember the first lesson of thieving, Peter: always verify your information_.)

When had he heard that? _I was fourteen. The munitions warehouse job. Falsified plans._

Nureyev doesn’t want to be remembering this right now. He rarely does, but this is really just the single worst possible time.

“That seems unlikely.” His voice sounds distant, as though it doesn’t belong to him ( _does it?_ ). “You didn’t just blindly believe this claim, I hope.”

“Do you really think I’m that kind of an idiot?” Juno snaps, with surprising vitriol. “Do you really think _I_ would believe that story for a heartbeat? Do you really think I’d have come out here, after _you_ , without making sure? I’m a lot of things, Nureyev, I’m a lot of _stupid_ , but sentimental about family I’m _not_.”

He could almost do it, just then, almost fall back into the pattern with a teasing reply, a wry smile. He doesn’t. “What _did_ you do?”

“She came to me a month and a half ago. It took me all of four days to find you -- I’ve spent the _rest_ of that checking her out. I ran her name and traced her story and called up contacts going back forty years and across half the Inner Planets and most of the Outer Rim. And _then_ I started looking for you. When even I was convinced that she was legit. And that there was a chance she was right about it, too.”

_(Don’t lend too much credence to personal sob stories.)_

_Summer, seventeen, a supposed safe house, the constable he’d had to kill._

Mag drove that first lesson into his head too well, and in too many iterations. Even all these years later, they still echo in his head when he needs them, though usually he can pretend they’re his own voice, pretend he doesn’t remember where he heard almost every one. Even now.

Now, when Mag is very much the _last_ thing he wants to be reminded of.

“I brought everything I found,” Juno says, finally shouldering off the bag he’s been carrying since he came into the hotel room. It hits the floor with the heavy _thunk_ of files and hard drives protected only by thin synth-leather, and the room’s cheap walls rattle. “It’s yours to look through, until you’re satisfied.”

“Four days?”

“No one else could’ve done it, don’t worry. I had Rita. And I _am_ a detective.” Juno pauses, and then says, roughly, “And I wouldn’t have done it for anything less. Either she’s the real thing, or someone’s finally caught on to you in a big way. I’m pretty sure either one is a big deal to you.”

Nureyev stares at the bag, and tastes bile.

The really bothersome part is that Juno’s reappearance isn’t even entirely a surprise. Loathe as Nureyev is to admit it even to himself, it’s something he’s spent a lot of time thinking about (feeling dread, hope, wistfulness, anger, resignation). His inability to feel _done_ with Juno, in the way that he inevitably grows restless and casts off from all other things, had been rather exhilarating before the Oasis; before the train; before the hotel. Now it’s mostly disconcerting, like he is losing control.

It’s not nearly as disconcerting as that bag, as the voice suddenly crystal clear in his head.

_(Never go back to the scene of a crime. If at first you don’t succeed, you’re a fool for trying again.)_

No, this is what’s surprising him, what he never considered the possibility of: someone looking for him. He had cast off from the idea of family back when he did from Peter Nureyev, and unlike that name he had never gone back to it. Something Juno had said in the hospital after their escape, groggy from painkillers and near-unrecognizably swathed in gauze, _had_ given him the vague idea that Juno had seen something to do with Mag in his memories. And it hadn't bothered him at the time. It had felt alright, then, with a pleasingly raw pain like that of a dislocated joint put back in place, to exhume Peter Nureyev and the two fathers who had been buried with him.

That was a door that had barely opened before Juno had shut it behind him. And the word _sister_ was so distantly beyond the realm of anything he'd ever considered in relation to himself (he had aliases with sisters; abstract details of characters he had played, with no form or existence of their own) that in Juno’s mouth it barely seemed like a word at all, mere sounds without referent.

( _Don't get attached._ )

That one had been a constant. Not constant enough for either of them, evidently.

“Nureyev?”

The use of the name, and the uncomfortable edge of concern in Juno’s tone, jolts him back to the present. But he doesn't answer, not now; just fixes his eyes on Juno.

Juno runs one hand back through his hair, a too-familiar nervous gesture, and sighs. “At this point I know her better than I know you,” he says. Not quite a joke. “Her name --”

“Stop.”

To his credit, Juno does, if only briefly. “You don't ––”

“For the moment,” Nureyev says, the only thing he's sure of right now, the only way he sees to put off the trap closing on him, if not to escape, “no, I don't. I don't want you to tell me anything. I… I’ll need some time to think about this. And whether I want any part of it.”

“So you believe the story, then.”

“I believe I’m no Pandora,” Nureyev says. “Obviously someone is looking for me who knows enough to be dangerous, but if you’re right, they can't find me without help. That gives me the luxury of time and deliberation, I believe, unless you intend to hit me over the head and drag me back to Mars.”

( _Never walk in if you can't get out._ )

 _Eighteen. New Kinshasa. Mag placed the last call to the shuttle captain who would be providing our getaway._ If he opens that bag, he will learn things that he is not sure he wants to, and he will know those things no matter how far he runs.

Juno is unexpectedly quiet in response to this, and he looks away, around the room. There isn't much to see. He took all of Peter Nureyev’s baggage with him when he left ( _he brought it back with extra, packed in a shoulder bag; how convenient_ ).

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “D’you want me to go, then?”

Nureyev isn't sure whether he should laugh, be grateful, or hit Juno in the face.

“What a considerate question. A bit late, perhaps.”

There’s no sign of a reaction in Juno’s eye, in his expression, but he makes a little involuntary noise, deep in the back of his throat, like a wounded animal. Then, suddenly shattering the tension, he laughs. It’s a short, unpleasant sound. ( _Have I ever heard him laugh otherwise?_ )

“I’m in town,” he says. “I'm sure you can find me. We’re good at that.”

He turns, and Nureyev can see the way his hands shake, the tightness of his shoulders, but he doesn't pause, doesn’t stop. Juno Steel walks out of the room and shuts the door behind him and leaves Nureyev standing there feeling like this conversation was a battle that neither of them ever had any chance of winning.

Juno can't have been there more than fifteen minutes. But now there's a bag sadly sprawled in the center of the floor, and the uncomfortable feeling of once more _being Peter Nureyev_ , voluntarily or not.

After a long moment, the noise of the perpetual storm outside slowly filtering its way back into hearing as he readjusts to the silence, Nureyev sits down across the room and stares at it, as though it is about to explode.

( _The past is dead. Living means you keep moving forward. Never stop moving, Pete._ )

Desperate to know more, to have some handle on himself, some anchor, he had left their hideout while Mag was on a job and broken into a government data center. He had planned it for weeks, followed every rule, every lesson; it still went wrong. The blare of an alarm, the fire in his lungs as he ran, the ozone smell of an orbital laser still feature in his nightmares.

Somehow, the Angel targeted the wrong person. It still happened, before they improved the algorithms. But Peter had barely made it to safety, where street searches and fear of another Guardian Angel strike kept him trapped. It had taken Mag three days to find him, and after a brief moment of terrifying anger, shouting what should have always been the first indication that Mag didn't want his past too closely turned over, he had held the boy close to him, and cried into his shoulder.

“It doesn't matter,” Peter had said, exhausted and relieved and numb.  “There wasn't anything.”

No father. No family. No record of a “Nureyev” at all, other than the old census file from when Peter was about six and had been picked up by a constabulary patrol. It had been enough, briefly, to convince him that the one token of his past was entirely imagined until Mag had told him that the records had probably been purged after his father’s defection; prevention by erasure rather than example. Peter had clung to this, had vowed to himself he would write that name back into the record, would write it so deep and so large they could never erase it --

That had all been lies, of course, and Peter wonders now whether Mag had truly believed he’d been the one the laser had hit, or whether he had simply feared that Peter had found something that had made the truth clear, and disappeared.

( _T_ _rust your partner. Be someone your partner can trust._ )

Now that anchor he’d wanted has made its belated appearance and brought him up short, and he can’t tell whether it will save him or drown him. There is an art show happening tomorrow, a once-in-a-lifetime convergence of a few choice pieces, a few important people; but math dictates that in a universe this size, and in a human lifetime so short, nearly everything happens only once in a lifetime, and missing one is no real loss. This is a more important question.

Peter Nureyev sits, and thinks, and stares at the bag for a very long time.

 

Laocoon _sucks_.

Juno has been of this opinion since pretty much the moment he set foot on this rock. It’s too hot, first of all; the temperature makes his skin crawl and he’s sure he’d be sweating bullets if not for the fact that secondly, it’s too damn wet. Rain pours down in endless sheets like it’s desperately trying to wipe this city off the map, and unfortunately it’s not working. Warm showers should be a luxury, he thinks, and they belong _inside_. It wreaks havoc with his lungs. He’s built for Mars, where the air is thin and dry and it’s cool even in the summer. This place doesn’t even get _gravity_ right, like he’s walking through soup with springs on his shoes, an effect just noticeable enough to make the entire moon seem somehow off-kilter. After only four months adjusting to the new limits of his depth perception, he’s been tripping over his own feet since he got here.

Physically leaving the limits of Oldtown, if you’re a kid, is hard enough. He had never taken his vacations while he was with the HCPD and he’d never had the money, time, or inclination after he went solo. The fact is, other than a few chases into the desert, two _very_ eventful trips to Cerberus Province, and a handful of jobs that had taken him to Olympus Mons or Tharsis or Memnonia, he’s barely left Hyperion City at all, much left _Mars_.

So being in this distant lunar city, on the edge of a growling and tropical ocean -- the first one he’s ever seen, and hadn’t _that_ been a surreal moment -- where the buildings are the wrong color and shape and size, and the sunsets are the wrong color, and the gravity doesn’t work right and the accents are unfamiliar and cars driving in opposite directions have side-by-side lanes instead of separate levels like on actual reasonable planets? It feels like he’s not even really awake. He walked out of the real world into some kind of unpleasant dreamscape, and none of this can really be happening.

It really doesn’t help that he’s here to see Nureyev.

He picks a restaurant, orders something cheap off a menu he can barely read, eats without tasting it, checks into his hotel -- somehow even seedier than the one he just left, but hey, it’s not like he’s got Nureyev’s kind of class -- and lies down on the bed for about an hour, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about the mess he’s gotten himself into this time, and pretending that he’s mostly concerned about the hassle, and not how much everything that just happened hurt.

Juno takes his comms out and makes a call. As soon as the other end picks up he says, “You’re always going on about being a detective. Here’s a piece of advice: never take a personal case.”

“Mistah _Steeeeeeeeeeel!_ ”

Rita yells at him for a good five minutes, apparently without breathing, about running off without telling her first, and about how she always worried somebody had taken him again now, and how it had _hardly_ helped that when she went looking she immediately discovered that he’d _left Mars_ , and he wouldn’t answer his comms, and she just couldn’t go on working under these kinds of conditions, boss, she’d been on the point of buying a ticket and following him --

It’s nonsensically comforting. Familiar. Something else to think about.

“Rita, I promise, I haven’t been kidnapped,” he said, when he could get a word in edgewise. “It’s for the case.”

“ _You_ went _eighty-five light years_ for a _case_? When that singer asked you to go to _Jupiter_ you threw her money in her face!”

“She was asking me to blackmail her son, Rita. It wasn’t about Jupiter.” Not a lie. It hadn’t been entirely about going to Jupiter.

“Never mind. Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Find her brother!!! Obviously!”

Juno lets out a long breath, and considers. “I found the guy I was looking for,” he says finally. “Still not sure if she’s right about him being her brother, remember.”

Rita goes quiet. Juno wonders vaguely if Mars just self-destructed or something.

“You said this was _personal_ , boss?”

Aw, crap.

“I didn’t say _this_ was personal. I said personal cases are a bad idea.”

“Yeah, but I know what you _meant_ ,” Rita says, sounding offended. “Boss, is that why you wouldn’t tell me anything about this?!” A gasp. “You _know_ him! That’s why she asked you to find him! This is just like in --”

Alarmed, Juno cuts her off before she can get started. “I… That’s not important.”

“Booooooooosssssss! Who is it? You know I can find out.”

“Yeah, and I can fire you.”

“So make it easier on both of us, and tell me!”

“Maybe later. When this all pans out however it’s gonna.”

He can practically hear her pout. “Fine. D’you want me to call Miss Sona up and tell her you found him, then, Mistah Steel?”

“No, Rita. I’ll call them myself, if I decide… It might not be best to tell them yet.”

“You can’t _lie_ to them about it.”

“Sure I can.” And he probably will, if Nureyev asks him to. Although if Nureyev just runs, Juno isn’t sure what he’ll do. This is not the first headache he’s gotten over the dilemmas of this case.

He has to see this through. He’s known it from the moment the woman in his office showed him four high-def, enlarged images of stills from the video of the Kanagawa mansion. You had to credit it to him; “Rex Glass” was remarkably good at angling himself just so, so that even the forest of cameras produced only partial or half-shadowed images of his face.

Of course. This wonderful knot that only he can unpick, only he can solve, no matter how he feels about it. Because sure, maybe for once he hadn’t _caused_ this one, but he was already a part of it, and he’s the only person with both ends of the string in his hands.

Or maybe he’s just breaking something again, while making one more feeble attempt to do the right thing. That’d be a lot like him.

If her story isn’t true, Nureyev is in trouble, and Juno has been connected to him and is now not only a liability to the thief but in danger himself. If it _is_ \-- and at some point in this past month, Juno has felt the suspicion creeping up on him that it is -- well, then.

He could have left it, he tells himself. Could have left both of them. Could have done the right thing and walked away, not come here as though he _deserved_ to, not done this to Nureyev again.

Sure.

“Anything else come in?”

“I don't think so!”

“Check the incoming call log, Rita.”

A moment, and then she says, “Your friend Mistah Mercury called!”

“Mick? What the hell does he want?” Juno pinches the bridge of his nose. The headache is back. “Listen, if he calls again, tell him I haven’t had a good paying case in a month and I’m offworld right now, so whatever trouble he’s in, I can’t bail him out of it this time, alright?”

“Boss, _no one who knows you_ is gonna believe that you’re offworld.”

“That’s his problem,” Juno says. “I’ll make it up to him when this is over, if I make it out of this alive. Bye, Rita.”

“Mistah Steel -- “

He hangs up, rolls over onto his back, and stares at the ceiling for a while longer, wishing sleep would come, wishing he could turn the world off and have a _break_ for a little while. The world does not comply. Juno is tired, deep down in his bones and his heart tired, an ache and a nothingness all at once.

All he can think about is Peter Nureyev, framed by the light of the open doorway, and the look on his face when he had seen Juno.

It becomes clear that sleep isn’t happening, and he doesn’t want to keep thinking about this. He stands up, puts his shoes on, leaves off the coat.

The rain has slowed to a thin drizzle, and here and there planet-light reflects through the clouds. He walks the twenty minutes down to the beachfront and stands in the wet sand, gazing out at the vastness of the ocean. It goes all the way to the horizon, like a black desert, pitching and rolling. He’s never seen anything like it.

“Weird,” Juno says.

He walks along the strand for a little ways, picks up a rock, throws it in. He watches the waves roll up the sand, and then back out.

“You seem to be enjoying the view.”

Juno stops dead.

“None of these back home,” he says, _not_ turning around, _not_ looking. “How does this even work? Moon magic or something, right?”

“You’re thinking of tides, and those are pulled by the planet and its rings here,” Nureyev says, coming up level with him on the beach, but a few yards away and on his blind right side, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the surf. “Waves are mostly wind. Strange, that Mars has so little surface water.”

“First terraformed planet, right?” Juno shrugs. “Some things just get made kinda messed up, don’t they. We make do.”

Nureyev puts his hands in his pockets. “I have questions,” he says.

“Okay.” Juno can feel his heartbeat in his ears. “Most of the stuff’s in that bag --”

“I’m asking _you_ ,” Nureyev says, sharply. It’s not a voice you can argue with, though Juno’s tempted to try.

“Alright,” he says instead. “What do you want to know?”

“Start at the beginning,” Nureyev says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just fyi, this fic is going to remain pretty much in the original Murderous Mask continuity! Thanks again to @ingridlake on tumblr for feedback and this AU and general coolness.


End file.
